HTC announces XR Suite and teases the future of collaboration and workplace

This night I woke up at 3am to participate in HTC Vive’s event on ENGAGE because I read that it was an “HTC VIVE LAUNCH EVENT” and I was super-confident in the launch of the Cosmos XR or at least of the Cosmos Play. Actually, I have been pretty disappointed because there has been no hardware launch, but my lack of sleep has been rewarded by the announcement of a new software platform by HTC and also by HTC publicly showcasing some prototypes I made in the last weeks.

So, let me tell you briefly what you’ve missed by sleeping yesterday.

The New Normal

Like with all the other events organized by HTC China, the keynote has been held by Mr. Alvin Wang Graylin, mostly known as “Mister President”, that is famous for the passion with which he performs inspiring talks.

In his speech, he highlighted that life as we knew it is gone for good because of the coronavirus, and in front of us basically we have no idea what to expect. We’re entering into an unknown future, a “new normal” that will be crafted in the upcoming months.

This “new normal” will for sure mean a broader adoption of technology, and especially of those technologies that make you connect with people remotely, the ones that make you “defy distance” (ok, actually Mister President hasn’t quoted Facebook, but the meaning was the same). Among these technologies, immersive realities will play a very important part, and HTC wants so to start offering services in that sense. And exactly in that context that comes the announcement of Vive XR Suite.

Vive XR Suite

HTC Vive XR Suite is a broad solution for offering tools that let people interact remotely with other people to perform various tasks, using whatever device they want. Vive XR Suite is composed of various packages, every one tailored at a specific purpose: for instance, Vive Museum, a part of XR Suite, is a solution that lets you organize your exhibition in VR, or that lets you attend an exhibition in VR.

What is interesting is that Vive has not developed all these packages alone, because it would have required a lot of time (and money). Since the time to act to connect people remotely is “now” because of the COVID, Vive understood that it had to be very fast (很快很快, in classical Chinese spirit), so it has partnered with key players in the industry that already offer these systems. For instance, Vive Museum will be offered by Museum of Other Realities, a popular virtual exhibition experience that you can find on SteamVR or Viveport. Some of these key players, like ENGAGE, are companies in which HTC already invests into.

Let’s look a deeper look to the solutions inside the XR Suite:

• Vive Sync. Developed internally by HTC, Sync lets you organize your meetings with your colleagues around the world, and interact with Powerpoint presentations, 3D models, etc…
• Vive Campus. A full university campus in VR where you can have virtual gatherings and events (university lessons, concerts, etc…) with many people, up to 2500. It will be based on VirBELA;
• Vive Sessions. An ecosystem to create workshops and educational lessons inside VR, for a maximum of 50 attendees per room (but rooms can be cloned). It will be based on ENGAGE;
• Vive Museum. A solution to organize virtual exhibits of artistic content and let other people come and admire it, like in a virtual museum. It will be based on Museum of Other Realities;
• Vive Social. A place to meet with other people to have fun and play together. It will be based on VRChat.

The fact that HTC has partnered with industry leaders is an amazing advantage, since this choice lets HTC launch a big suite of interesting products very fast. Furthermore, these products are already validated from years of usage, so this is not a beta, but it is already a stable release. The other side of the coin is that it is not entirely clear what this re-branding means: there will be a parallel HTC-branded whitelabel app being a competitor of the already existing experiences? Or will the XR Suite brand just be a big box containing the products made by others? And what about if these companies take another route and for instance get bought by Facebook? All of these are unknown for now, and probably everything will be explained better after the official launch.

What is interesting is that HTC believes in open systems, so all the products of the XR Suite will be compatible with all platforms:

• All PC VR headsets;
• All standalone headsets;
• Desktop PC;
• Mobile.

This is necessary to ensure that everyone will be able to connect using the XR Suite to the biggest number possible of people, even the ones not having VR. This compatibility makes me think that all the above apps (including ENGAGE and VRChat) will so be compatible with mobile phones before the end of Q3, and that’s great for increasing their markets. Vive has showcased how ENGAGE will work in all 4 different modes, and it was interesting to see that the experience was running very differently on all platforms (e.g. the version for the Vive Focus Plus had a very simplified avateering system).

The XR Suite package will have a free tier and a Pro version for professionals and companies. An official launch will come in Q3 2020, at first in China and then in the rest of the world.

Strategic partnerships

Some big partnerships has been announced yesterday, and the two most important ones are:

• A partnership between HTC and BaiDu, the biggest search engine in China. BaiDu will help HTC in distributing the XR Suite in China, but honestly, I haven’t got exactly how this collaboration will play out. Anyway, it is like if Oculus had partnered with Google here in the West, so I envision that great things could come out from this collaboration;
• A partnership between HTC and HP. HP, one of the biggest manufacturers of PCs and Laptops will start selling in China VR-ready laptops with the XR Sync suite already pre-installed. This may be important for increasing the user-base of HTC products dramatically.

What I’m seeing from these partnerships is that:

• HTC, while having some problems in the West, is creating a big ecosystem around its products in China;
• HTC is moving from being a hardware company to being a company of services, both oriented as consumers (Viveport), innovators (XR Suite) and enterprise (XR Suite Pro). The Lion King of VR Charlie Fink always says that the killer app of VR is “people” and the Vive XR Suite is a full suite built around connecting people, so it may turn out to be a key product from the Chinese company.

Some relevant points

There are also some interesting slides I want to describe to you:

• HTC has shown that the future of retail may happen in VR: in Japan, there has been a big VR market opened in VRChat where people could go around, watch products (assisted by the people of the online shop), and then buy them. It has been an interesting experiment during the lockdown times;
• VR is better than audio/video for events since it increases focus by 48.6% and improves the willing of socializing by 54% with respect to traditional methods;

• Mister President has put HTC devices in the famous reality-virtuality continuum by Milgramm. While the Cosmos XR was at the AR voice (because it lets you do passthrough-AR), the teased Vive Proton was listed in the Augmented Virtuality section. AV is when you have a fully virtual environment with some real elements inside (e.g. your real hands, or the real people around you). It is quite an interesting choice: the only other headset claiming to do AV was the Intel Alloy (that died terribly fast)… what does HTC want to mean with this?

Prototypes for XR workspace and virtual e-commerce with the Cosmos XR devkit

I was very honored to see that HTC during the launch of the XR Suite showcased two prototypes that I made in New Technology Walkers‘s offices (thanks Mister President!).

The first one is a remake of the video of the e-commerce of the future that I made some weeks ago: in the future we’ll be able to interact with our computers in a natural way and try objects that we want to buy in our space before actually buying them. So, I made a prototype with Unity and the Cosmos XR where I can actually take out a PC from an Amazon page and try it on my desk. It is pretty cool, and you can see it here:

The second one is the one that I teased at the beginning of the article. Inspired by the videos made by Varjo and Facebook, I decided to use the Cosmos XR to create a prototype of the office of the future, where you have no real screen in front of you, but you can have as many virtual screens as you want. You can interact with applications naturally with your hands, but also in the standard way with a real keyboard and a real mouse, that make the interactions easier if you have to write stuff. In the video, that has been made with the support of my Chinese assistant Miss S (she helped me in making everything more beautiful), you can see me:

• Entering the system
• Enjoying my virtual offices getting decorated with virtual plants and props at startup
• Interacting with my virtual desktop using mouse and keyboard
• Interacting with an AR shortcut menu with my hands to open some applications
• Opening multiple windows and interact with them with my hands (I can move the displays where I want with my hands)
• Opening a virtual e-mail with a 3D attachment that I can grab with my hands
• Make everything crash with a BSOD… because even in XR good Windows traditions never die 🙂

Notice that everything is real and developed in Unity, there is no postprocessing, and in fact, I haven’t even mounted parts of the video to show that everything worked flawlessly from start to end. Enough for talking, here you are the future of the workspace!

And with this showcase of the office of the future, this article ends! As always, I’m very curious about your impressions on HTC’s new product, about the role that XR will have in our new reality and also about my prototypes! Let me know what you think in the comments or on my social media channels!